Coffee blog

The latest news and stories from the Strong Vend team.

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Coffee Production starting to Decrease

Farmers of Coffee being produced in countries such as Brazil and Columbia are currently facing some challenging times when it comes to their coffee crops. The production of coffee in the last year has decreased massively and this is due to adverse weather conditions in these Southern American countries which is affecting their harvesting and ruining their crops.

Drought problems have brought production to a 33-year low of 7.8 million bags, each weighing 60kg in 2009, and over the past few monthsâ€™ heavy rain (which are anticipated to last until April) has disturbed the flowering cycle and brought insects and disease to coffee plantations. Many farmers have now opted to start farming more pasture, oranges and avocado as they believe that coffee is not as profitable as it use to be, such as in 2005 when coffee producing countries had a surplus of beans.

The heavy rains and flooding which has been caused over recent months has affected more than 2 million people in some way, shape or form. More than 300 people have died, thousands of homes have been destroyed, and 1.3 million hectares of land (5,019 sq miles) were submerged. Damages are put at $5.2bn (Â£3.3bn).

All of this has also had an impact on the pricing of coffee and back in September 2010 the price of coffee was recorded at an all time high at Â£1.18 per pound. Many coffee companies had to compensate for the hike in prices and duly raised their coffee prices to reflect the fluctuations of the global green coffee market. However despite, the decrease in production, demand for coffee is still very high with Global consumption growing at a pace of 2.5 percent per year since 2000.